Recently our store has been under constant attack by a team of fraudsters. 2-3 days per week they place a considerable amount of fraudulent orders to roughly the same shipping addresses. I obviously cancel and refund these as soon as possible.
This causes a huge analytics problem for our daily operations. Even after refunding and canceling these orders, the numbers (reveunue, conversion rate) are included in our analytics. Example : I woke up today with 60-70% of our revenue (I don’t know the exact number as I would literally need to get a calculator out and manually deduct the fraudulent order revenue from total revenue) came from these fraudulent orders.
This : a) incorrectly inflates our data, leading to incorrect decisions b) renders our homepage dashboard useless as it does not provide any accurate data any longer c) making something as simple as checking our daily revenue a chore as I either need to calculate the revenue by summing each real order manually or go through multiple pages somewhere in the analytics to find what I am looking for
This wasn’t the case a while ago, then there was an update where the way these analytics are showed was changed. I did not really have a problem with it until we were being attacked by this team of scammers. I talked with Shopify support and obviously they said the data was displayed this way to provide a ‘accurate and transparent’ view of the data but if you look at our situation this is is completely the opposite and it may even cause harm to our daily operations and business as a whole. Is there any way to display the actual accurate data on the dashboard?
Wow that’s a pain. Good suggestion on excluding that data (or at least having a checkbox option to decide to show all or remove certain data segments, like fraud or refunded orders).
I wonder if Shopify has a way to detect and organized fraudulent attacks like this. Just tossing that in the suggestion box in case someone from Shopify reads this.
Maybe Shopify could form a partnership with the FBI (for US orders, and equivalent organizations in other countries), and report the data from fraudulent orders, give the shipping address a look, etc.
Being such a large company now, they may even have the resources to influence litigation too. If it was a more serious crime to scam and steal from people online maybe it would deter so many people from doing it.
Fraud is such a big problem in our industry, it pains me to see so much stealing and attacks on honest businesses (I used to own a store as well and felt that pain directly).
Sorry I don’t have a solution, I hope Shopify does for you, but just wanted to add that idea for Shopify to try and make a positive impact on everyone by getting more actively involved in fraud fighting.
Woke up today again with loads of fraudulent orders. For the rest of the 18 hours of the day, our homepage dashboard and analytics dashboard will be providing incorrect data as we obviously had to refund these fraudulent orders. And as always, all of them were placed from Miami.
Update: spent a few hours trying to figure out how to check my actual real sales data for the day. There is no way. There is no report available that shows how much revenue we made - the canceled fraudulent orders. The only way I can check our revenue is by pulling out the calculator and deducting manually.